Congress can easily avoid shutdowns. Here’s why it doesn’t.

Funding for government lapsed early Saturday morning, as a short term spending bill stalled in the Senate. Lawmakers have been busy pointing fingers at who's to blame for the impasse. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

A government shutdown is like the weather. Everyone talks about it, but nobody does anything about it.

There’s one big difference between the weather and shutdown, however. Nobody can do anything about the weather while members of Congress can easily avoid shutdowns.

Indeed, they usually do, with only four “true” shutdowns in modern times if you count the current one, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, 18 short “funding gaps,” some involving brief closures. But there have been lots of continuing spending resolutions that have avoided shutdowns — at least 106 times since fiscal 1997.

If they can prevent shutdowns most of the time then, why not all the time? Members all say they hate them. The answer, according to the bulk of the evidence, is that there’s largely no pain at the polls for most members who help instigate shutdowns, even when people blame them or their party for the disruption.

Like members of Congress, voters too say they hate shutdowns, polls show. But by Election Day, in successive contests, they have demonstrated that they don’t really care.

But there is often gain for members.

Particularly as the electorate has become more polarized around issues such as taxes, health care and now, immigration, members are rewarded by their bases for fighting the good fight, for taking a stand, according to studies.

And sometimes, the standoff offers elected officials in Washington leverage, their only chance to demonstrate unyielding commitment to a particular cause and maybe even to score a win, however small.

That’s because wins and leverage are hard to come by in today’s “broken” Congress, where meaningful legislation on major issues is such a rarity. Even when those “wins” are uncertain or unlikely, members persist. “We have to get something out of this,” said Rep. Marlin A. Stutzman (R-Ind.) in a now-famous quote during the 2013 shutdown drama, “And I don’t know what that even is.”

Nobody knows all this better than Tom Davis, the former Republican House member from Northern Virginia who served in the House for seven terms before leaving Congress in 2008. With thousands of federal employees in his district, Davis and a few other members tried repeatedly to pass legislation that would forever avoid government shutdowns. When Congress failed to reach agreement on spending by the time the clock ran out, Davis’s proposal would have triggered a default spending law to keep the government up and running, an automatic continuing resolution. (A similar proposal was introduced in this session of Congress by Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Lloyd Smucker.) Several states have such laws.

Despite its simplicity, the proposal never got serious consideration, Davis told The Washington Post on Sunday night. “The problem is that it takes away the ability of one side to blackmail the other side. That’s why it never goes anywhere.”

And this “is the way the leadership wants it,” he said. “They like the brinkmanship . . . At the end of the day, most members don’t care if the government shuts down if it helps get them to a better place” on some specific issue of importance to their base, he said.

Consider, he said, the Democratic insistence on using the government shutdown to try to win extension of the “dreamers” program, known officially as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA. “The political calculation here,” Davis said, is that “you have a president with high negatives and a Democratic base itching for a fight” over immigration.

Using an unrelated spending bill as leverage, particularly in such a theatrical, high-profile way, helps many Democrats. “In the long term, your base sees you as a champion. You’ve drawn a stark line,” just as Republicans did in 2013 when the government shut down for 16 days over their insistence that President Barack Obama yield ground on his signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act.

It’s a terrible way to do business, Davis said. But “before you’re too critical of them, remember it’s the only leverage they have, particularly now that the legislative process is so broken and appropriations is the only thing that moves.”

“Deadlines typically force action,” Sarah Binder, an expert on Congress at the Brookings Institution and George Washington University told The Post in an email. That’s why we call these spending bills ‘must-pass’ measures.” It’s not necessarily the case that “Congress likes shutdowns, she added. It’s “a failure of the system rather than a choice of one or both parties.”

Shutdowns are all about “branding” for members, write political scientists Andreu Casas and John Wilkerson, who closely studied the 2013 shutdown for the messages members tried to communicate during and after the event. Those in safe districts, where Obamacare was especially unpopular, used their militance to highlight their die-hard opposition to the ACA.

“Conservative Republicans were elated” with the shutdown, write Casas and Wilkerson, seeing it “as their best opportunity to defund the Affordable Care Act.”

In less safe districts where a shutdown might be more unpopular than Obamacare, Republicans highlighted their efforts to resolve the impasse.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) is seen on a television as he speaks during the seventh hour of his filibuster on the Senate floor at the U.S. Capitol on Sept. 24, 2013. (Charles Dharapak/AP)

The best example of branding derived from a shutdown is probably the case of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) His 24-hour speech before the 2013 shutdown, during which he read “Green Eggs and Ham” to his daughters on C-SPAN, helped make the otherwise obscure freshman a national figure, loathed and ridiculed by many but lionized by the most fervent opponents of the ACA. It turned him into a plausible, albeit ultimately unsuccessful, contender for the 2016 presidential nomination.

In fact, once the shouting has died down, millions of Americans really didn’t care about that shutdown, write legal scholars David Scott Louk and David Gamage in another study after the 2013 event, in which they, like Davis, proposed a default mechanism to prevent such closures.

“Even widespread dissatisfaction with government shutdowns does not necessarily translate into effective voter disciplining of politicians,” they wrote.

Both parties — and especially the Republican Party — are increasingly driven by the more partisan segments of their membership. Indeed, three months after the 2013 shutdown, a Washington Post/ABC News poll showed that Republican voters supported the Tea Party at the same rate after the shutdown as before it, signaling that even as a majority of Americans disapproved of the Republican tactics that led to the shutdown, the core GOP constituency continued to show largely unwavering support for the party’s most anti-tax politicians.

In today’s climate, they write, members “rarely face direct consequences for refusal to cooperate, and sometimes face direct consequences for being seen as turncoats.”

“A look back at previous shutdowns suggests that there could be a clear immediate political reaction, but that those effects are likely to fade over time,” as Harry Enten wrote on Jan. 20 for FiveThirtyEight. “Prior shutdowns haven’t had long-term electoral implications,” he wrote, noting that in the congressional election of 1996, just a month after the end of that year’s shutdown, Republicans held their majorities in both the House and Senate.

“Basically, America put the same people who shut the government down back in office.”

The same proved true the 2013 shutdown, which reportedly cost the economy at least $24 billion or half a percentage point of the gross domestic product but cost Republicans nothing.